Bethesda's Pete Hines Tells Angry PS3 Gamers The Main Game Is What Counts, Not DLC

This whole ordeal between Bethesda Softworks and PlayStation 3 owners regarding Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has devolved into a bit of a PR nightmare. A quick recap is as follows: Bethesda announces some DLC for highly popular multiplatform game Skyrim, they have a deal with Microsoft so that the Xbox 360 version gets the DLC first for 30 days. People are fine with this, except the DLC that was planned to arrive for the PS3 never shows due to some technical difficulties. A few months later and the DLC still hasn't arrived. Bethesda's PR guru Pete Hines then admits that things aren't looking too good for the future of DLC on the PS3. Cue angry PS3 gamers. Today, Pete Hines is saying that gamers should be happy that they have the main game and that us gamers don't buy games “on the promise of DLC”.

The inflammatory but politically correct statement by Hines comes courtesy of Gaming Bolt, who picked up on the statements via Twitter, where angry PS3 owners questioned Bethesda's Hines about the company's DLC practices and its negative result on the PS3, and Hines replies with the following...

It's true that there is only a percentage of gamers who buy DLC but sometimes it's a large percentage, such as in the case of Mass Effect 3 where there was a 40% attachment rate to the day-one DLC. I'm not saying that's a good thing, I'm just saying that it's kind of a large percentage of gamers.

Hines' response seems to come from a man tired of dealing with the troubles of angry consumers. It's understandable. At the same time, though, transparency hasn't seemed to help much especially after they revealed that all future DLC for the PS3 could be held up until they get DawnGuard working, which is still being worked on by Bethesda and Sony.

However, I have to agree with Gaming Bolt and Hines on one thing: I think gamers have become so used to being fed DLC that they've become way too complacent to it. I'm not saying DLC is inherently evil or anything, as outlined by Rock, Paper, Shotgun. But for this case, it's probably best PS3 gamers continue to make this thing public simply on principle alone, so as to prevent future instances where a product is released in a half-arsed state. Hopefully though gamers can scale back on their consumption of DLC enough to make a dent where this kind of fiasco can be avoided in the future.